“I just felt something was wrong,” says Lucilla, a teacher who lives in the small Italian city of Mantova.
Together with her husband Stefano and two children, Dario, aged eight and Leila, six, she had moved to Mantova to escape the frenzy of Milan. But they still felt unfulfilled and anxious, and were worried about how their children were growing up.
Constant rushing and stress, feelings of isolation and entrapment, lack of community and alienation from nature. The symptoms were clear. And the cause, they reasoned, was the urban lifestyle itself.
“The city is killing us,” says Lucilla. “Everyone is always on their phone. There’s no sense of being connected with the people around you, of being connected to the natural world.”
They decided that an alternative commune might be the solution to this malaise.
After shopping around, they settled on Honeydew, a relatively new eco-community based in the hills of Romagna in central Italy.
As I discovered when I visited earlier this year, they were just one of several families making the move from city to commune.
Honeydew sits in an Elysian landscape of trickling rivers, dewy woodlands and soft, rolling hills that turn beguiling shades of pink and ochre in the evening light.
To the north, the landscape gradually peters out to a flat coastline, with the bright lights of Rimini twinkling in the distance.
Just across the valley, the medieval borgo of San Leo - described by Italian medievalist Umberto Eco as the most beautiful village in Italy - floats above the hills like some celestial apparition. As surroundings go, it’s hard to imagine anything quite so idyllic.
Part Dickensian dandy, part new age evangelist, Benjamin Ramm - the commune’s loquacious founder - leads me around the facility he now calls home.
Born and raised in London, Benjamin sold everything he owned and embarked on what he called the “the great transition away from the urban”.
Catalysed by the pandemic and the generational desire for a break with the material and ecological traps of city living, his commune began to take shape.
Honeydew actively welcomes visitors to come and stay for free in their ‘hotel’ in order to experience communal life without committing to a full stay.
Guests can take part in touristic activities such as hiking, yoga and cooking classes while getting a feel for what life in an alternative community is actually like.
Ramm sees Honeydew as a bridge connecting people from the mainstream to a more sustainable communal lifestyle.
Some folks live here full time, others keep a foot in each world, and a few have used Honeydew as a springboard for transitioning to a completely off-grid lifestyle.
But there is a consciousness-raising aspect here too: an opposition to consumer culture and a belief
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While accepting one of the many Oscars he received for the film Parasite at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020, South Korean director Bong Joon Ho advised that Americans would do well to “overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles” in order to discover an even broader swatch of amazing films than already available at our fingertips. Indeed, subtitles are nothing to be afraid of—but that doesn’t mean the movies they caption can’t be scary themselves. Amongst our editorial staff, in fact, there’s a consensus that foreign horror productions are actually much more terrifying than those produced stateside—bolder, bloodier, darkly funnier, and more haunting for their willingness to leave questions unanswered.
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